Maurice Broun, left, and the indomitable Rosalie
Edge, right, were Poole's partners in conservation.
Below is Poole's painting kit.
ent New York City wildlife crusader, soon
would become involved.
GETTING AN EDGE
to these shocking seasonal shootings.
But his 1934 paper in The Auk, the
journal of the American Ornithologists'
Union and one of North America's mostrecognized periodicals dedicated to bird
biology, was the first detailed report on
the annual hawk shootings occurring on
the mountain. And it drew the attention
of the conservation community.
Poole presented a telling scene: "On
certain Sundays in October the writer has
seen as many as forty cars parked along
the nearby road, with considerably over
a hundred gunners stationed at points of
vantage along the ridge. On such days,
the roar of the guns is almost continuous,
and resembles a Fourth-of-July celebration on a vast scale. The consensus of
opinion among those who have taken part
in these "hawk shoots" over a number of
years, is that only a quarter as many fly
past now as could be seen eight years ago.
Little wonder!"
Witmer Stone, editor of The Auk in
the mid '30s, said in correspondence a
year later, that Poole "...was the first to
call our attention to the shooting that was
going on there."
As Hawk Mountain began to gain
national attention, Rosalie Edge, an afflu20
Edge founded and chaired the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC),
which advocated a philosophy still
relevant in conservation today: Keep
common species common to avoid
greater expenses to save them later. She
detested immediately and unequivocally
the hawk shootings occurring on the
mountain.
Poole and Edge didn't seem the types
of people who would join ranks, especially when you consider what Poole's
son remembers most about Dad was,
"his quietness."
Edge was anything but quiet. Profiled in the April 17, 1948 issue of The
New Yorker, she was described by her
mentor, Willard Van Name, an American
Museum of Natural History zoologist,
this way: "She's the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in
the history of conservation."
Yet something clicked
between the outspoken
Edge and the reserved
Poole. After Edge's ECC
leased - then bought - the
Kittatinny heights used
by the gunners, she and
Poole, who became
the sanctuary's first

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